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1. Introduction
Impulse buying (IB) is “a sudden and immediate purchase with no pre-shopping intentions either to buy the specific product category or to fulfil a specific buying task” (Beatty and Ferrell, 1998). It is a well-researched topic in marketing (Bandyopadhyay, 2016; Togawa et al., 2020) and accounts for a substantial proportion of goods and services sold (Sharma et al., 2014b). One way of increasing IB is through advertising (Chen et al., 2019). Marketing communication drives IB (Iyer et al., 2020). However, there is limited empirical evidence linking advertising and IB. Advertising expenditures and IB sales volumes are huge (Mohan et al., 2013). Still, there is little work relating the two and hence, we study the effects of advertising on IB.
There is a common theoretical basis for studying IB in conjunction with humor and scarcity appeals. Self-regulation theories (Vohs and Faber, 2007) explain why consumers indulge in IB. Consumers find it difficult to resist temptations when their self-control resources are depleted and they experience urges to buy impulsively, which lead to IB (Mohan et al., 2013). Humor is a facet of positive affect; positive affect decreases focus on specific goals and instead shifts consumer’ focus to abstract ones (Hicks and King, 2007). Abstractness of goals leads to IB (Bell et al., 2011). When exposed to humor appeals, consumers are likely to be happy and excited and this then weakens self-control (Fedorikhin and Patrick, 2010) leading to IB (Vohs and Faber, 2007). Similarly, scarcity leads to urgency (Aggarwal et al., 2011) and when urgency depletes self-control is depleted leading to IB (Jang et al., 2015). Thus, both humor and scarcity are related to loss of self-control.
From the brief exposition above, the following gaps emerge: There is little work.
Connecting advertising and ad appeal types with IB.
Connecting appeal types’ differential effect on IB in vice and virtue products.
Humor (scarcity) appeals increase anticipation of enjoyment (perception of uniqueness) and anticipation of enjoyment (perception of uniqueness) in turn, may increase IB greater in vice products. Specifically, when consumers see an ad with a humor appeal, they are likely to be happy and excited (Fatt, 2001) thereby weakening self-control (Fedorikhin and Patrick, 2010) leading to IB (Vohs...